Serendipity & CO2 Scrubber

One of the great things about making and mixing music with modern software is the role serendipity can play. With CO2 Scrubber I was messing around with an echoey synthesizer patch which was sounding nice with a drum & bass line I'd come up with. Looking for a counterpoint, I played a plucking mandolin line. It just so happened the echoes of the synthesizer syncopated perfectly with the mandolin, creating pretty trippy effect. I laughed out loud when I first heard it. I use it at the beginning and end of the song.

As I was getting rolling on this one (June 2006), I had been watching a documentary about the Apollo 13 mission so I decided to build the song around that. This gave me an organizing theme: normal operation -> explosion -> frenzied anxiety -> solution -> triumphant return -> normal operation. (More about using a story later.)

I was still working with GarageBand at the time and still recording drums with a single stereo mic, but it represented my most complex effort to date and sort of culmination of the skills I'd developed so far. For the explosion, I put a couple of bricks at the bottom of a large cardboard box, hung my mic over it and hurled beer bottles at the bricks. It didn't turn out as good as I'd hoped, even with effects added, but it was fun.